


Other people's voices

by newleaves



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Communication, M/M, Weddings, season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-24
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-28 14:43:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16725387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newleaves/pseuds/newleaves
Summary: Oliver has some doubts about the wedding.  He asks for help.





	Other people's voices

“I just don’t know if it’s a good idea.”

Oliver was over at Asher’s apartment, escaping the house for a while and sharing some of what Asher insisted on calling _B Man Time_. It sounded awful, but Oliver went with it, because B Man Time meant pizza, relief from babysitting duty, and, on this occasion, the opportunity for him to have a completely healthy, completely normal, completely insignificant freak out about the wedding.

“I mean, how long have we been together, really? We didn’t even agree to do it following a real proposal...”

“OK, cool it right there,” Asher interrupted.

He was watching Oliver from the bed, a damn _mood board_ for the wedding on the covers in front of him, because he clearly had too much time on his hands.

It was actually kind of neat, if Oliver was being honest, with pictures of men in tuxes cut from magazines and place-settings printed from the internet. But Oliver knew that Connor wouldn’t go for any of Asher’s ideas, which was what had set him off.

“You know that you two are perfect for each other,” Asher continued, as if the mood board didn’t suggest otherwise. “And maybe you had what we straights like to call a whirlwind romance, but that is _totally_ legit and pretty much plot of every Hollywood movie. The timetable is not what’s bothering you so, come on.” He beckoned Oliver over with a hand. “Give it to me.”

It wasn’t clear from the gesture whether Oliver was supposed to join him on the bed or simply keep talking. He settled for staying on his feet, somehow comforted as he looked around the apartment’s gloomy, cheap décor. “It is so wrong that I feel safer here than back home,” he muttered.

Asher jutted forward his chin, cupping a hand to his ear. “What was that?” he asked facetiously. “Did I hear that someone feels safe with Daddy Asher?”

 _So wrong._ Oliver looked at him, not sure what he was feeling. In the end he simply went with whatever came out of his mouth. “I feel like I’m about to get found out.”

It was a feeling that Oliver had felt all his life, at least from the age of thirteen when he’d really, _really_ started noticing the other boys in gym class. He didn’t have a cute/horrible coming out story like Connor’s, only years of trying to hide things from his mom, while she and his dad gave him every opportunity to talk. He’d refused until the age of seventeen, when there had been another Christmas of his uncle asking him about girls and he hadn’t been able to take it anymore.

Ever since his test had come back positive, Oliver had found himself right back in that place. It was another hugely stressful thing that he knew he should be dealing with, but he didn’t want to, and now there was this huge, pressing deadline…

Maybe this was why he was cracking in front of Asher right now, pacing again because he couldn’t keep still. “I mean,” he said, not sure how to explain it, “I am super gay.”

Still on the bed, Asher’s expression was incredulous. “Bitch, we know...”

“No, I mean like…” Oliver held up his hands, looking around the apartment that he’d offered his Queer Eye design tips for. And Asher had listened, even – the sex scratches behind the bed were hidden by a poster. “I am all-out, 1970s-TV-host, two-poodles-named-Britney-and-Christina, pride-parade…” He shook his head. “I could sing you the entire _Flashdance_ OST, right here, right now.”

“And that sounds kind of awesome.” Asher nodded sagely, as though he could even name one track from the album.

Oliver sighed. He wasn’t making any sense.

At this sign of imminent defeat, however, Asher seemed to decide to get real. He set his mood board to one side and shuffled down the bed, moving closer to where Oliver was standing on the floor. “Connor knows that you’re into all this, O-Man,” he told him. “He’s been living with your vinyl for years.”

“But he hates it when gay goes inverse hetero.” Oliver was convinced of that. “He hates the games and the ritual and the gross big white cake.” And Oliver could kind of see Connor’s point, but… “But I _want_ a big white cake,” he admitted, not quite able to meet Asher’s eyes. “I want everyone in formalwear throwing glitter at us.”

Asher scoffed, “Then _tell_ him that, you big dummy.” He found a pen from somewhere, clicking it to life before he scrawled a few words on his mood board. Oliver guessed that they were _CAKE_ and _GLITTER_.

The thing was, Oliver knew that Asher was giving him the right advice. He’d been trying to drop hints all summer… “But what if he says yes because I want it, and then on the day he hates _everything?_ It won’t be _our_ wedding anymore, just mine.” Right? “And I don’t want that. I want it to be something that makes us both happy.”

“Seeing _you_ happy is what’s gonna make him happy,” Asher said, as though they’d been over this, when Oliver wasn’t sure that they had. He sounded disappointed. “Come on, bro.”

It was super frustrating. “Well, that’s not enough for me, OK?”

Oliver could see how it would all pan out. Maybe Connor would put up a fight, at first, but the moment that Oliver told him how much he wanted this stuff – how much he had _always_ wanted this stuff – they would be on the road to Connor saying that his principles weren’t as important as making the biggest day of their lives the biggest _day_ of their _lives_. And Oliver would never know if it was true that Connor didn’t really care – that cake-based heteronormativity was something that he only complained about to impress his corporate marks – or if he actually had a fully-formed, alternative vision of a wedding that _he_ wanted and which they would never get to experience.

The selfish part of Oliver was happy to accept that the former was most likely. But the not-so-selfish part? “He went on this whole speech at C&G,” he explained to Asher, trying to start from somewhere concrete. “It was to get into the hot new guy’s head –“

“You mean my new neighbour,” Asher pointed out, nodding to the wall.

Oh god, they were only feet away from the angel Gabriel right now? Oliver stared, trying to figure out if the man would be able to overhear them, before shaking himself and turning back to Asher. _Connor Connor Connor,_ he thought. “He came out with this line about the way that societal pressure makes people feel as though they need to settle down. Michaela told him that he was full of crap.”

“Because he was.” Hearing Michaela’s name, Asher’s expression was hardening slightly, but he seemed willing to wait for Oliver’s point. He threw his pen back to the nightstand.

“Yeah,” Oliver agreed. “Or maybe not. Entirely.”

Now Asher frowned.

“He talks so much – hot air.” Oliver had to sit down at this point, so he headed over to the desk, where there were still a couple of slices of pizza to be eaten. “Sometimes, I don’t think he even knows what’s real in what he’s saying and what’s not.” Awkwardly, Oliver confessed, “I mean, _I_ don’t even know sometimes.”

The pizza was still a little warm. Oliver took a lukewarm, comforting bite as Asher opened his mouth to say something – but then he seemed to think better of it.

“What?” Oliver asked around his mouthful.

“Nothing.” Asher shook his head. “You finish.”

Oliver shrugged, swallowing. “Well, that’s it, I guess. I don’t know.” He clarified, because he realised that this sounded bad, “I mean, I know who he is underneath all of that, and I love him…” There had been B-Man-Time beer earlier, hadn’t there? Maybe Oliver needed another beer. “I see him all the time, the real Connor. When he’s working, mostly, or when there’s a crisis.” Or when the sex had taken them to a really good place, but Asher didn’t need to hear about that. “But it’s like he can only talk in pick-up lines, or bullshit to get under people’s skin, or crappy jokes, or speeches that he’s scripted.”

“And…?”

Right. This wasn’t the end of the point. “And it’s like I never get to hear what he has to say,” Oliver finished, waving his pizza. “The man that I’m in love with.” And there it was, Bum-Out Central. “So, for all of this stuff – wedding stuff, life stuff… How am I supposed to know what he wants?”

For a little while after that, Asher said nothing. Oliver felt his own mood fill the apartment and it was depressing, really. He wanted to go back to hearing Asher’s ideas for favours that they could never afford. All of them were endearingly awful.

Finally, his best man sighed, and it was the signal that whatever he said next was going to be real. And that was one thing that Oliver loved about Asher, because he was always so obvious. “OK, so screw the cake,” was his opening, and it seemed kind of harsh until he continued, “because this right here is what you two need to talk about.”

He drew some circles through the air with his hands, just in case Oliver had missed the point.

“But before all that…” Asher added, still serious. “And I can’t believe that I’m saying this, by the way.” _This is a serious concession, O-Man._ “You should talk to Michaela.”

“What?” No no no… Oliver needed to keep on subtly _avoiding_ Michaela. He was over his vindictive stage, but they were still only baby steps into their slow reconciliation.

Asher rolled his eyes. “I know it sounds crazy,” he said. “She’s heartless and shallow.” This wasn’t what he really thought – again, obviously. “But she and the C-Dawg are besties. Their read on each other is flawless.”

Was this true? Oliver thought back, trying to figure out whether he agreed. Connor had been friendly with Michaela for a long time, but that had all started when Connor and Oliver had been broken up. He hadn’t seen Connor and Michaela together that much… Though she _had_ been the one to get Connor to talk to the group about Wes, hadn’t she?

“I shouldn’t be telling you about this, man,” Asher said, as though he’d figured out that Oliver needed convincing. “And it’s all water under the bridge… But Connor was a total bombsite when you two were fighting last year, and after the fire, when he was acting like a beotch? I don’t know…” He put on a voice, which Oliver knew he would probably call racist if he allowed himself to think about it. “She git dat boi.”

For now, it seemed as though he had another reason to hate his second best man. _Great._

“I shouldn’t have said that, should I?”

* * *

Inevitably, Oliver put off the conversation with Michaela. There were other things going on: Frank’s shady interest in flip phones, Nate Senior’s case, twisty-tie rings lacerating his finger… Besides all that, once Annalise found a reason to put him back on the payroll, Oliver became able to convince himself that things weren’t at all as bad as he thought. Being around Connor all day was more than enough to make up for not knowing what was going through his head. Almost. Close enough.

But then Connor had gotten a bee in his bonnet about why Annalise had picked him for the K5, and concluded that the reasonable response was to have a throw-down row with everyone's boss in a glass-walled, very poorly soundproofed office.

And the cherry there on top of that? Apparently Connor had been suicidal at some point in the last year, and Annalise knew about it, and she was quite happy to use that knowledge as a weapon in front of her entire class, not caring whether or not they caught the word through the glass. All while Oliver had known _nothing_.

Enough was enough. “I need to talk to you,” he told Michaela quickly, once Annalise had left and everyone was starting to react. It was the right decision, he thought, to leave Connor in the office for now. He needed time to hold himself together and look strong while he was still a spectacle. Right now he was pitching back and forth in agitated angles, his body language more angry than upset. Oliver could imagine the expression on his face, but he doubted that many others could. “Can we get drinks tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Michaela replied, her voice not shaky like Oliver’s, but hard like she was angry. She was watching Connor too, but another few seconds and the show seemed to be over for most people. “Wedding stuff, right?”

It was a good excuse that Oliver should have thought of himself. “What else?”

Finally the everyday chatter resumed, and the angel Gabriel took the lead in dividing up work for the coming week. Everyone was immediately focused on him, arguing about strategy.

These were law students, Oliver remembered. They had all signed up to work in dysfunctional environments. They weren’t easy to faze.

He was heading to the office when Michaela caught his elbow, lightly.

“Don’t push him,” she asked for a promise, her eyes serious. “It’s gonna be a heavy few days.”

“I wasn’t planning…” Oliver replied, looking between her and Connor. Did everyone know about Connor’s mental health besides him? “Though Annalise can’t expect him… He spent all weekend –”

“Oh, he’ll be working twice as hard,” Michaela told him, determined. “You think any different, then we _really_ need to talk.”

* * *

Michaela was right, of course. If Oliver had thought about it, then he would have known too. The events of the next twelve hours were familiar: not much of the night was left over when they finally got home from C&G, and Connor was moody and evasive all the way into bed.

“You wanna talk about it?” Oliver asked as Connor came back from the bathroom.

And his betrothed said very little, simply raked his eyes over the lumps and bumps of Oliver's knees, under the duvet. “You’d better be naked under there.”

After that, the door was closed, the lights were out, and the sex was less loud than – focused. Intense and maybe a little angry? It didn’t seem like the sex of someone on the edge, but apparently Oliver didn’t know what that felt like. It certainly wasn’t the sex of someone exhausted from a long few days of work with another one ahead of him tomorrow.

The next morning, Connor’s alarm went off half an hour earlier than usual, but not the earliest that it ever had. “I want to get in before Gabey hogs the files,” he insisted.

With a kiss, he was off to the shower and Oliver was drifting back to sleep, because one of them needed more than five hours of it to function.

* * *

“I’ll say this for cheap rent,” Michaela toasted that night, once they’d finally found a bar where they could hear themselves talk. “It makes going out for drinks a _lot_ more affordable.”

“I miss cocktails,” Oliver commiserated, clinking his bottle of beer against her Cosmo. He had a wedding to pay for, after all, so there were no cocktails for him. At least not when he didn’t know how many they would be drinking tonight.

After one sip, Michaela wrinkled her nose and told him, “Yeah, well, you’re not missing much…”

It was probably true. The bar that they’d found was one step up from a dive, because neither of them could afford the nice hotels near C&G. But the place had OK drinks and there were no crying babies, so it might as well have been a day spa, as far as Oliver was concerned.

“So, you wanted to talk,” Michaela continued, setting her drink to one side. They were in a booth, because apparently this place was quiet on weeknights, and hopefully they weren’t going to be bothered. Even if the table was sticky. “Is this about yesterday, or actually about the wedding…?”

The pause was enough to make Oliver look up.

Connor’s BFF was smiling at him, dangerously. “Because I promise you right now, if you walk out on him? I will gladly rip both your arms from their sockets.”

“What?” Oliver replied immediately. “ _No._ My god…” He wasn’t sure which thought disturbed him more, the idea of leaving Connor before their wedding or the idea of Michaela coming after him. “Why would you even think about that?” he asked.

“Just testing,” was Michaela’s reply, a light aside as she went back to her drink. She still had a smile on her face, and it was impossible to tell whether she was joking or not.

Oliver took a long swallow of his beer. “I wanted to talk to you about Connor,” he said, putting his cards on the table. Connor who was still finishing up at the office, before he met them at home and did all of this again, again and again. “Both in a wedding-related way and in a yesterday-related way. In a general way, I guess.”

“Shoot.”

Right. So, this was the part where Oliver shared his most personal fears with someone that he wasn’t actually sure that he liked.

Or – he could abandon that plan and come up with something else to talk about. “Do you know where he stands on getting in a DJ versus having a live band?” OK, this was awful. “I would have guessed a DJ, but then I thought that maybe you’d know if he was secretly into jazz or swing or…”

Michaela said nothing, just blinked at him. It was kind of intimidating against the murmuring hubbub around them.

Oliver let his ramble of nonsense trail off.

“You did _not_ bring us all the way out here to talk about music.”

And besides, Oliver knew, Connor wasn’t into jazz or swing. He liked Tchaikovsky, Bach and Beethoven, and a load of other dead white guys that Oliver forgot, and he had played piano until playing the field had cut into his practice time. He would want something familiar that everybody knew at the ceremony, if they had a ceremony that involved any music, and then he would want a DJ at the reception.

Which Oliver knew because, right, he wasn’t marrying a complete _stranger_.

Dropping his head to his hands, just for a moment, Oliver tried to figure out where to start. “Asher was being my agony aunt,” he came out with, cringing. This was a terrible place to start. “He said that I should talk to you…” Which was always a good idea? “And this was a few weeks ago, but that’s why we’re here.”

To her credit, Michaela didn’t roll her eyes or scoff or do anything to laugh at him, the way Oliver had thought that she was going to. She let her fingers rest on the table’s edge, inspecting her pale pink fingernails. “And what did Asher think that I could help you with?” The expression on her face was glossy, easy, and pretty much entirely fake.

All of Oliver’s angst seemed really stupid right now. “He said that you knew how to level with him – Connor, I mean. That you could see through all his…” And there was no good word for it, was there? “Stuff.”

Michaela nodded, and the threat to rip off his arms really put a new spin on every move that she made. She looked out into the bar, sipping again at her Cosmopolitan, and by the time that she put down the drink she seemed to have prepared Oliver a speech.

“By _stuff_ ,” she accused, turning back to him, “I assume that you mean his sarcasm and his jokes about everyone having sex with each other.”

“Right,” he replied. What else could it be?

“And I assume that you’re _not_ talking about his legitimate anger with a professor who has been manipulating him since the day that he arrived in her class.” Her eyebrows were high with incredulity.

Though Oliver wondered, was it really fair to say that Annalise had been manipulating Connor since the _day_ …?

“And I _assume_ ,” Michaela finished, her voice dropping lower, more severe, “that you love him for who he is, and not for whoever you would like him to be – with the result that your _question_ is in fact about communication, rather than an attempt to reassure yourself that the parts of Connor you _don’t_ love might one day be _fixed_.”

In the end, there wasn’t anything that Oliver could do besides nod. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, of course.” How the hell could she come to any other conclusion?

Michaela tilted her head at him, and it looked so much like one of Asher’s moves. “So you’re just a guy who figures out, halfway to the altar, that you don’t _understand_ your fiancé?”

OK, so there was pretty much only one thing Oliver could do in this situation. He was under a lot of stress, and he didn’t see how Michaela could justify any of this hostility.

“You know, I didn’t come here to be yelled at,” he complained, on the spot and irritated. He took hold of his beer bottle, because otherwise he was going to knock it over, he knew. “I came here because it turns out that my fiancé was suicidal last year, and I did not know a damn thing about it.” He squeezed the glass. “He didn’t tell me anything, and I didn’t figure it out.”

 _God damn you, Connor,_ Oliver thought, pushing the bottle against the table, the sadness of it all in his throat.

“I don’t know how to talk to him,” he pleaded with Michaela to understand. He was embarrassed that he was going to cry when he wasn’t even drunk. “I love him and I want to be with him forever and I don’t know how to make him talk to me.”

“Well, why didn’t you just say that?” Michaela threw back, picking up her own drink and screwing her face into a _pshaw_. “Admit that this is about you, not Connor.”

Oliver shook his head, willing his eyes to dry up. Honestly, he hadn’t realised that there was a difference. He wondered if this was how witnesses felt on the stand.

“There’s no _secret,_ ” Michaela continued, as though Oliver was basic. “You both talk and you both listen, the way that you always have.” Ever so smoothly, she took a sip of pink. “You get better at talking; you get better at listening. Boom,” she finished, her voice completely dry, “you improve your relationship.”

And that was it.

For a moment, Oliver thought that there was going to be more, but Michaela just looked at him.

A short laugh blew out of his mouth. Because this was ridiculous.

“What?” Michaela asked, hostile again, as though she’d actually intended to be helpful with her advice.

Oliver looked around the bar – anywhere rather than at her. The crowd was mostly straights and beer buddies, with no obvious groups of solo women. It was not Oliver’s scene at all, though presumably most of these people thought that he was here with Michaela, because who _wouldn’t_ bring a date to a place as mediocre as this?

“Asher was right,” he decided, no matter that this wasn’t precisely what Asher had said. “You’re exactly the same.”

“Who?”

“You and Connor.” Now Oliver looked at Michaela, and she didn’t even seem bothered by the accusation. He let go of his beer, just to prove that he wasn’t intimidated. “Neither of you are willing to say what you mean,” he pointed out. “Neither of you will ever say a word in your own voice – it’s all jokes, and threats, and clichés.” Wasn’t Michaela supposed to be Southern?

“All of us speak in other people’s voices,” was what Michaela said back to him in her crisp, unplaceable accent. Her drink was down on the table again, and Oliver supposed that this was intended to mean something. “We imitate other people from the day that we’re born, whether it’s our parents or our teachers or someone on the TV. We pick our pattern and then we spend our lives telling other people who to pick for theirs. Hey –”

For emphasis, then, Michaela leaned forward, slamming her arm down on the sticky table. It was only then that Oliver found himself fully connecting with the thought that she’d probably spent a lot of time in places far divier than this, and that her pristine appearance these days didn’t mean that she’d grown up clean and cared for.

“Don’t look away from me,” she commanded, and Oliver hadn’t even realised that he’d done so. She was staring at him, judging. “The fact that you don’t seem to get it, all the voices that Connor uses because he hates the ones that he was given… That tells me you that grew up happy to be you.”

She pushed on her arm, palm on the table as a threat.

“And that’s great,” Michaela told him sarcastically. Or maybe not. “But you don’t get to tell him that he’s not himself just because he’s difficult to understand.”

Then she leaned back again, making clear that her point was made and that this was now Oliver’s moment to defend himself.

The words came out of him in a rush. “I’m not trying to do anything like that,” Oliver insisted, and he was conscious that they were in a crowded bar, so he tried to keep his voice below the volume of the music. “I’m just trying to figure him out.”

“And you’re asking me to give you the key to the code, when _there is no key to the code_ ,” Michaela shot back. She shook her head, biting her lip and, for the first time, glancing around them. “You don’t think that I’m being honest with you,” she stated, and it was a harsh accusation, again. “Connor?” she scoffed. “Basically a liar.”

She was overstating what he thought, Oliver was sure about that.

But Michaela didn’t seem to care. “He loves you so much.” She sounded disappointed, though it wasn’t obviously with Oliver himself. “Have you ever thought that instead of never being serious, he is _always_ trying to get through to you?”

What, even when he threw out lines that other people used to say nothing? Or to hurt each other? “But that’s so sad.” It couldn’t possibly be true.

Michaela just snorted, and it was possible that this meant something too. “Were you not listening to Annalise at all?”

And it drove Oliver insane, she was so defensive… But that – that was what he supposed she was telling him to look past.

* * *

By the time that the night out was over, Oliver was exhausted. Michaela had talked him around in circles to the point that he wasn’t sure that he could honestly state his own name anymore. He’d tried to make a point about computers, because computers were easy to understand, and logical, and she’d bullied him into the admission that an instruction in one language wasn’t comprehensible to a computer expecting another and that computers were in this way completely useless at talking, and wanting people to be computers was asking for people to crunch themselves down into bricks and die.

They’d also talked about other stuff, though, and that had been nice – Connor and Asher and Oliver’s family… It had kept them out way past the time when he should have been asleep.

“Hey,” Connor greeted as Oliver staggered into their bedroom, drunk on two beers and half a bottle of wine. The man was sitting in bed, looking nothing like a slut but like a law student, the lines of his torso cut up by a black muscle vest as he browsed through something on his laptop.

Oliver would have bet twenty-thousand dollars that he was looking at notes on the Nate Senior case. “You still up?” he asked, and it struck him that this wasn’t exactly what he meant. _I’m worried that you should be asleep by now, but it’s always nice to see your face and your arms and your commitment to this old black dude in jail._

Damn Michaela.

“I’m always up for you,” Connor replied, at first absently, then with a grin and wide eyes that locked on his, as though this was the very best joke in the world.

Oliver snorted, shutting the door behind him as Connor closed down his laptop. His teeth would survive one night without brushing, wouldn’t they? And his skin without one night of the routine? Michaela was going to be in the good bathroom, and she was going to take ages. “I love you,” Oliver told Connor, still against the door. Because sometimes words were easy, weren’t they?

The way that Connor raised an eyebrow suggested that they were not. “Did you and Michaela get completely wasted?”

“No,” Oliver insisted. He made his way over to his side of the bed and climbed in, clothes and socks and all, throwing his head into Connor’s shoulder and half of him across his chest. His law-student fiancé was warm and he smelled more like bed than their sheets did, and Oliver was cold after all the alcohol and the autumn wind outside.

“I’m not sure I believe you.”

“Mm…” Oliver complained, refusing to move and keeping his eyes closed. It was love – it had to be – when Connor didn’t throw him off, just rubbed a warm hand up and down his chilly arm. “Tell me about your stuff,” Oliver demanded.

“What ‘stuff’?” Connor replied.

Finally Oliver accepted that the term probably did need definition.

He didn’t bother replying, though, because he didn’t know what he meant, or if he meant anything besides ‘all of it’. In the end, Connor started talking about what he’d learned since Oliver had left the office with Michaela.

And it was all pious, harshly-drawn, neatly-packaged slogans – the sort of thing that made Oliver roll his eyes when he came by it on the message boards. None of these lines could take in the truth of the situation, he thought, which was always messier, more grey than black and white.

But then, it was less that Oliver tried to listen, and more that he tried to think. The court would have all the information that Connor had access to. Nate Senior had killed a guy, and it didn’t mean anything to point out that that was a sketchy thing to do. There were two possibilities, that he deserved to rot in prison for it, or that he deserved to have the legal system say that he’d paid his dues and it was time to let him go free. Connor was passionately convinced of the latter, and he was pulling together the reasons why – according to his own beliefs, but also according to the agreed beliefs of their country. Nothing he was saying was self-evident: the interpretation had to be made, and the messiness was implied.

It was the passion on Connor’s tongue that Oliver had always been drawn to – but he hadn’t ever realised the second part. The conviction that Connor had, that his passion was righteous, and that everyone would feel the same way if they could only see where he was coming from… It was wilfully idealistic, and it should have been annoying, but, actually, Oliver couldn’t work out why. He _wanted_ to live in a world where justice looked like the picture that he was being painted. A world ruled less by technicalities than by the recognition of motive, a respectful relationship between the system and the individual.

Damn, he was marrying such a renegade.

And wow, that was it.

“You don’t want a wedding where you’re nothing but a cog in the system,” Oliver said out loud, and his heart burst to realise it. Because he could work with that, couldn’t he?

“I’m telling you about the grossest injustice in our prisons –” Connor’s voice floated through the darkness and the warmth, full of disbelief. “– and you want to talk about _weddings_?”

He didn’t let go, though. He didn’t let go.

 _We were talking about both of those things,_ Oliver wanted to tell him. They were talking about all the times that Connor had felt trapped, used up and pointless. They were talking about everything.

And Oliver wanted to tell him – to say more than, “Yup.” But he was after this point asleep.

* * *

By the time that their parents had mandated how the wedding was going to go, Oliver was feeling a lot better about it. It had become even less of a priority, after Nate Senior was killed, but along the way he and Connor had had some good talks, at least from Oliver’s point of view. He’d tried to be direct whenever possible, and Connor hadn’t thrown it back in his face.

Had he talked to Connor about what Annalise had said? Not so much – at least not in any direct way – but the signs were obvious in retrospect, so Oliver thought that he knew what to look out for now.

When Connor chose to bait Minister Molly all the way through their meeting, pouring out his frustration after weeks of late nights, early mornings and intense, exhausting sex that Oliver could barely keep up with… This was all pretty much a giveaway that things were not right.

And it wasn’t that Connor didn’t mean it. He always meant _something_. And maybe Oliver heard him right at that moment, when he used their love as a weapon and made clear how much he wasn’t ever going to pretend. He wasn’t just being obtuse. He was trying to shake the world out of its complacency, to force everybody to act on how they felt, because it was grinding him down that all he could see was life following the same script as every day before.

It wasn’t a bad thing to want, and Oliver was on board. He only wished that he knew how to help, because it had never been his mission to act out. Really, his acting out had only ever involved drinking too many shots and getting fresh with strange men.

So that was what Oliver threw on the table. He threw it out there, got rebuffed, and kept throwing it until they were in Debriefed and the message got through that they lived in a world where this _could_ have been their night out. None of what they were doing was ever going to be set in stone.

In the end, only he and Connor made out. But it was good, and fun, and not at all angry or sad. They made out so much, in fact, that they managed to make the others go home from embarrassment, which was a first for everyone.

“You can make out with other guys if you want, Oli,” Connor told him at one point, his eyes hot and desperate in the busy lights. Their hands were all over each other. “Just – please; I don’t want you to.”

“You too,” Oliver replied quickly, dragging him back close again, tasting tequila, lime and salt. “Right.”

With them attached at the face, the conversation made no sense – but somehow, also, it did. On one level, it was entirely moot whether Connor said please or declared that he wouldn’t allow Oliver to kiss around: it wasn’t going to happen, either way. On another level, begging please was the admission that Oliver had a choice, that they both had a choice, and they were going for closed, exclusive monogamy all the same. They weren’t doing this because anyone had power over them, or because they had power over each other, but because they wanted to. And wasn’t that beautiful?

The end of the night was truly awful, but Connor at least stopped punching the homophobe after the fifth time that Oliver called his name. The man was groaning when they left him, staggering to his feet as Oliver darted looks over his shoulder all the way to the corner where the Uber liked to pull up. The driver didn’t even complain about Connor’s face.

It was only when they finally made it to bed that Oliver realised that he was running on adrenaline. He was wide awake and in love with a temperamental guy whom he’d seen with his face cut up twice now, who a few months ago had been choked against a door by one of their closest friends. It seemed a lot less weird than it should have done. It seemed like keeping this guy alive was Oliver’s reason to exist, so that they could keep having these adventures, change the world.

“Are you sure that you’re OK with all this?” Oliver asked the ceiling.

By his side, Connor whined, and it sounded like he’d almost been asleep. “OK with what?”

“The wedding.” And maybe this wasn’t the best time to talk about it, but it was back on Oliver’s brain and he wanted to. “It’s going to be so wedding-y.”

Honestly, Oliver wasn’t sure whether that was what _he_ wanted anymore. As a child, he hadn’t ever pictured who would be standing with him at the top of the aisle. He’d always only ever been waiting, sometimes with a hat under his arm and a cane in his hand. There had been flowers everywhere, groomsmen and bridesmaids and family. That had been his fantasy, once upon a time, and it had been enough.

Now he knew who he’d been waiting for, and the enormity of what they had – _life_ , basically... That made the rest seem less important.

“You want to call the whole thing off?”

Two years ago, a line like that from Connor would have made Oliver flip out. Now, too deep into this, it made him laugh, because the idea was ridiculous. He rolled onto his side, picking out Connor’s features in the darkness. “Can you imagine my mom’s face?”

Connor glanced over, cuts and bruises framing his raised eyebrows. “I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing it anyway,” he drawled, and he was serious again, or at least a different kind of it. “It’s gonna take five seconds for her to realise what I’ve done to the pictures.”

“Probably,” Oliver agreed.

But then he thought about his mom and the way that she had never understood why the Red Ranger needed to marry the Yellow Ranger again when he’d been married to the Blue Ranger only last week. _Why not let them live their lives? They should buy a car, or have a baby. Don’t they have jobs? How are they paying for all these parties?_

“Though, honestly?” Oliver reached out, stroking his hand over the part of Connor’s face that he knew didn’t hurt. There was no way that anything would keep his mom from showing Oliver's wedding photos to every single one of her friends. They were going to fuss over Connor the way that they’d always fussed over him, he was sure of it. “All she wants is to see us happy.”

It wasn’t visible, in the dark, but Oliver felt it in his thumb when Connor smiled. “Then let’s give her a show.”

And Oliver smiled back, because hadn’t that been the offer since the beginning?

_Just say the word…_

There was no need to hesitate. “Let’s do that,” Oliver agreed, kissing his nearly-husband on the cheek. Then they could get on with whatever.


End file.
